Hugo – Film Review

By BylineTom Gurin on

Hugo is an adaptation of the book by Brian Selznick titled The Invention of Hugo Cabret. I read the book when I was in 5th grade and was delighted at Selznick’s creativity. Much of the book was actually told through pictures (illustrated by Selznick). The images were beautiful and told much of the story that the words couldn’t reach. Therefore I think it is fitting that it be adapted into a movie.

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In this film, Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is an orphan living in the Montparnasse railway station in Paris between World Wars I and II. Since the death of his uncle several months ago he has been winding and tending to the clocks in the station. He sees the bustling crowds and jovial characters and vivid colors brought very much to life for us, but he sees them from far away, through grates and holes in the walls and the clocks. He seldom dares enter this beautiful world lest the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) should apprehend him. He meets Isabelle (Chloe Grace Maretz) through her godfather, “Papa George” (Ben Kingsley), who we later learn is none other than the legendary filmmaker George Melies, now fallen from his former glory. To some extent this film is a tribute to him. The movie is astonishingly consistent with Melies’ life, down to the toy shop in the Montparnasse, the disappearance after WWI, and the 1929 gala retrospective of his work. Scorsese even used real clips from A Trip to the Moon, combined with shots of Isabelle’s godmother (Helen McCrory) in Melies’ style, to weave her into the old film.

The most crucial piece of the whole film, I believe, is the automaton, which Hugo’s father discovered in a museum and Hugo spends the entire movie attempting to fix. It is broken and, as Hugo says, “It’s just waiting to do what it’s supposed to do.” Isabelle later notes that her godfather is very similar to the automaton in that he is broken. His purpose is to make ingenious and inspiring films, but something now keeps him from his past. As it would turn out, the automaton itself is the missing part that “fixes” George Melies and allows him to reconnect with the life he once had as a filmmaker. However, there are more than two automatons in the film. Though he doesn’t realize it, Hugo himself is broken. Just as Melies is separated from his past, Scorsese makes a point of highlighting the distance between Hugo and the world he wants to live in. This makes Hugo as much a broken automaton as Melies. In the opening shot of the movie, Scorsese shows us how confined Hugo really feels. He starts with a wide angle encompassing all of Paris; he then narrows onto the train station; he zooms in, and we fly past the people on the platform eventually closing all the way in on Hugo who is peering through the clock on the wall:

 
The clock is literally keeping Hugo away from the grand outside world. In many later scenes we see the distance from Hugo’s perspective:
 
 
In this frame, Hugo spies Isabelle through a grate in the wall. There is always something between him and the world he wants to inhabit. Hugo, too, is broken because there is a whole piece missing from his life: the outside world. As Isabelle notes, Hugo’s purpose is fixing things. But who will fix him? 
 
 
The heart-shaped key is the final piece that fixes the automaton; the girl who gave the key to Hugo is his key– the piece that eliminates the distance between him and the world: Isabelle. She draws him out of the walls and into the bustling crowds he’s only been seeing from crevices and vents so that he can fulfill his purpose by fixing things. More specifically, by fixing George.
         
their heart-shaped keys came along. For George, it was his machine. For Hugo, it was Isabelle. The genius in this film is that Scorsese turns us, the audience, into the automaton:
 
 
In this shot, Hugo and Isabelle stare at the automaton but they are really staring at the camera. In this way Scorsese makes us feel like we, too, are broken and need to be fixed which helps us to relate to George and Hugo. And when they are “fixed” in the end, we feel both fulfilled and relieved.
             
Hugo is able to exist in the world which
he formerly observed as an outsider.
George Melies suddenly transforms
into his past self.

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Author: Tom Gurin

Tom Gurin is an American composer, multimedia artist, and carillonist based in Switzerland. He was a 2023 laureate-resident at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, and the 2021-2022 recipient of a joint Fulbright-Harriet Hale Woolley Award at the United States Foundation in Paris, where he completed residencies in both music and sculpture. He is a Fellow of the Belgian-American Educational Foundation. A graduate of the Royal Carillon School in Belgium, Gurin served as Duke University Chapel Carillonneur until summer 2021. He studied composition at Yale University, the École Normale de Musique de Paris, and privately with Allain Gaussin. He is currently a master’s student in electronic and multimedia composition at the Haute École de Musique de Genève. Contact him online here.